I was not enthusiastic about Aliens: Dark Descent when it was revealed at Summer Games Fest last year. The cinematic trailer nailed the tone and atmosphere of the Aliens universe, but the snippets of RTS gameplay shown weren’t at all what I was expecting. Aliens needs a certain paranoid, claustrophobic tension to work, and I just couldn't see how that could ever work in an RTS. After going hands-on with it at PAX East this week, I'm a lot more sold on the top-down perspective, but I'm less sure I know what kind of game Dark Descent actually is.
By its most literal definition, Aliens: Dark Descent is a real time strategy game. You control a squad of four space Marines from a bird's eye perspective and direct them to move, fight, and use abilities, all in real time. There is strategy in how you move your squad, which fights you take and which ones you avoid, and how you prepare for attacks by staging the battlefield with defenses.
But Dark Descent has almost nothing in common with the RTS genre. It doesn't use any of the conventional mechanics we think of from games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, or Total War. There’s no base building, no army construction, and no resource management other than health packs and stabilizers to calm your squad down when their stress levels get too high. You aren't developing a city and going to war with the xenomorphs, but there is deep strategy in the way you command each unit in battle. It's technically an RTS, but calling it one doesn't feel right.
I assumed there must be a gap in my knowledge, that Dark Descent must come from some lineage of squad-based RTS games I'm just not familiar with. There are chapters in StarCraft where you need to maneuver Raynor and a small platoon through a hostile planet, but Dark Descent is like one of those missions blown up into a full game. The developers tell me their biggest influence is X-COM, and it's easy to see that. Still, this feels like something new, though I'm not convinced it's something good.
Taking the Colonial Marines through each Alien-infested environment is a lot more intense than it first appears. With low vision and a limited radar visibility, the xenomorphs can come from nowhere and do a lot of damage quickly. Dark Descent's sanity meter adds an interesting layer of tension to exploration. Throwing your squad into harm's way risks breaking their resolve and losing control of them. You can't just have them sprint from one objective to the next, and that slower pace has a way of immediately raising the stakes.
Marines have a lot of tools for dealing with the aliens too. The demo took place around the halfway point and I had a dozen different weapons and devices I could use to set up defenses, create choke points, and try to gain an advantage over the horde. Some tools, like turrets and flamethrowers, are designed to cover an area, and you have full control over the placement and direction they cover. There are also flares that help with visibility and accuracy, and heavy weapons like grenade launchers that can clear out big packs before they get to you. You have tons of options for how you handle a fight, but it never feels like there's enough time to plan appropriately.
I struggled to get through the big alien wave set pieces, in part because I was still learning all of the tools, but also because there's no way to stop the action and form a plan. At best you can slow down time while you choose which item to use and where to use it, but the xenomorphs move so fast that even in slow motion they're extremely dangerous. It's hard to gauge how many resources you need to commit to a fight, but if you don't sufficiently protect yourself it pretty much ends instantly.
I also had a hard time seeing my squad as individ✤uals rather than a single unit. They each have their own wea𒁃pons and specialities, but when setting up your defenses the game automatically chooses who is best suited for each task. You can split them up and position them individually to take advantage of cover and sight lines, so I often found myself just stacking them up in a corner and hoping for the best.
It was a short demo and there's still a lot I don't understand, but I felt a little lost in the control scheme and mechanics, and I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that this is the only game of its kind. I don't have any experiences to fall back on and none of my knowledge of RTS or X-COM games really served me here. It's uncomfortable to not have a foundational understanding of the controls and mechanics, but maybe it's supposed to be. It would certainly fit the themes of the series to be made to feel out of your depth and overwhelmed.
I think Dark Descent nails the tone, so I'm hopeful that with time the gameplay will click too. Looking back at the reveal trailer, the cinematic does a great job of capturing what it's like to command your squad and defend them from xenomorphs attacks. There's a lot of interesting tactical options I'm looking forward to exploring further. Everything you do in the world is persistent, so if you lay down mine as a trap or weld doors shut to create choke points, they'll remain that way whenever you return to the area, even if it's many missions later. It feels like the kind of game you have to spend some time with before it clicks, but I'm excited to see more when it launches June 20.